Vita Sexualis

Karl Ulrichs and the Origins of Sexual Science

Ralph M. Leck

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780252098185
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Karl Ulrichs's studies of sexual diversity galvanized the burgeoning field of sexual science in the nineteenth century. But in the years since, his groundbreaking activism has overshadowed his scholarly achievements. Ulrichs publicly defied Prussian law to agitate for gay equality and marriage, and founded the world's first organization dedicated to the legal and social emancipation of homosexuals. Ralph M. Leck returns Ulrichs to his place as the inventor of the science of sexual heterogeneity. Leck's analysis situates sexual science in a context that includes politics, aesthetics, the languages of science, and the ethics of gender. Although he was the greatest nineteenth-century scholar of sexual heterogeneity, Ulrichs retained certain traditional conjectures about gender. Leck recognizes these subtleties and employs the analytical concepts of modernist vita sexualis and traditional psychopathia sexualis to articulate philosophical and cultural differences among sexologists. Original and audacious, Vita Sexualis uses a bedrock figure's scientific and political innovations to open new insights into the history of sexual science, legal systems, and Western amatory codes.

CHAPTER 1

Motifs in Sexual Science

Unlike other disciplines, sexual science knows
no borders; its domain is life itself.

—Max Marcuse, Dictionary of Sexual Science

The next three chapters of this book are devoted to an analysis of Ulrichs’s scholarship, politics, and intellectual influence on subsequent sexual modernists. This chapter, however, crafts a contextual setting for understanding Ulrichs’s contributions to sexual modernism. Vita sexualis is an organizing concept of this book. It designates two historical developments: (1) the growth of sexual science as an academic field and (2) the emergence of sexual modernism. By the late nineteenth century, the phrase vita sexualis enjoyed a broad cultural significance in fin de siècle Central Europe.1 Vita Sexualis: Journal of Research on Sexual Life was the title of an early professional journal of sexual science.2 Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) and Albert Moll (1862–1939), who helped to establish the academic discipline of sexology in Austria and Germany, used the phrase vita sexualis as a synonym for sexual science.3 They conscripted this term to designate the vital meaning of sexuality to the life of humanity. What I hope to recall by invoking vita sexualis is the ascension of the science of sexuality as a robust and legitimate realm of scholarly inquiry. Yes, sexual research had been undertaken prior to 1850, but by 1900 sexology had attained an unprecedented degree of professional stature. In fin de siècle Europe, the application of the scientific method to the study of human sexuality became a recognized academic discipline with correlative journals, academic legitimacy, and professional organizations. In contrast to Ulrichs, however, many late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sexual scientists endorsed the academic legitimacy of sexual science but rejected the egalitarian politics of sexual modernists. Ulrichs was unique because he linked his pioneering sexual science to a radical demand for sexual revolution. This hyphenation of methodological innovation and insurgent politics might best be understood as an epistemic revolution in civic virtue. A new science of sexual diversity potentiated the modernist assault on Victorian mores and amatory codes.

Despite the immense volume of contemporary scholarship devoted to sexuality, the pioneering scholarship of European sexual modernists like Ulrichs has been largely forgotten. One reason for this lacuna may be contemporary arrogance and ignorance. Many contemporary scholars of gender assume that early sex research was deficient, if not disreputable. Another explanation for the mnemonic eclipse of sexology is the long shadow cast by Sigmund Freud. Prior to the Great War, Freud was not universally recognized as the leading European theorist of sexuality; before 1910, he was seen as one among many sexologists. He served, for example, on the editorial board of Anthroprophyteia, a pathbreaking Viennese journal, edited by Freud’s Viennese colleague, Friedrich Krauss (1884–1930) and devoted to the study of erotic folklore and sexual anthropology. As Freud’s reputation grew, however, so too did his presence in the debates and journals of the sexual science movement. For instance, in his 1913 essay “The Three Foundational Forms of Homosexuality,” which appeared in the Yearbook of Sexual Intermediaries, Hans Blüher (1888–1955) amended “An Open Letter to Sigmund Freud.” He criticized Freud’s insouciance toward his publication on the youth movement as an erotic phenomenon.4 Like Freud’s presence on the board of Anthroprophyteia, this letter from the theoretical mastermind of the German youth movement evinces the growing integration of Freudian psychoanalysis into the cultural fabric of sexual science.5 Eventually, Freud’s centripetal intellectual gravity largely obliterated from our collective memory the sagacious contributions of Freud’s contemporaries to European sexology.

The Freudian eclipse was long lasting. In the early 1950s, Simone de Beauvoir penned Must We Burn de Sade? Here, she wrote: “Not only does de Sade … anticipate what has been called the ‘pansexuality of Freud,’ he makes eroticism the mainspring of human behavior.”6 However, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, not Freud, coined the term sadism in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). Krafft-Ebing’s scholarship therefore deserved more than passing notice by de Beauvoir, but by the 1950s the gravitational pull of Freudian theory was much greater. Still, hidden amid de Beauvoir’s notes were traces of a lost matrix of erudition. She cited the first French edition of Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (1904) with critical commentary by “Docteur Eugen Duehren.” Dühren, it turns out, was none other than Iwan Bloch (1872–1922), a renowned Berlin sexual scientist who had rediscovered 120 Days of Sodom in Paris while doing research on Sade. Bloch produced two fascinating volumes on the significance of Sade to the history of sexual science.7 However, neither of those studies, nor Sadism and Masochism (1902) by Albert Eulenburg (1840–1917), nor a correlative study by her French compatriot, Dr. Emile Laurent (1861–1904), was referenced by de Beauvoir.8 In other words, the immense intellectual achievements of sexual science, from which Freud’s work drew its nourishment, and the enormous sexual research produced simultaneously to Freud’s great works, were either unknown or largely forgotten after WWII. Due to the disproportionate volume of research devoted to Freud, the present work will not re-till this well-turned soil. Instead this book focuses on the larger movement of sexual science, which preceded and accompanied his scholarly production.

More recently, Foucault’s The History of Sexuality has displaced Freud as the dominant theoretical lens of sexual scholarship.9 Foucault, like earlier scholars of Freudian thought, rarely invoked the foundational contributions of early sexual researchers. However, this does not mean he lacked an outlook on sexual research prior to Freud. His outlook was wholly dismissive.10 He tended to see the pre-Freudian science of sexuality as a moralistic medicalization of sin and as an example of instrumental science. Yes, these elements structured much of the classificatory science of fin de siècle sexology. However, there was much more here. For instance, the major methodological form of fin de siècle sexology was the case study. The civic meaning of this methodology is not a clear case of epistemic bio-power. Case studies accomplished something completely new in the annals of Western culture. As we shall see, they gave voice to sexual others and, thereby, produced the greatest scholarly chronicle of sexual diversity the world had ever known.

The Case Study: Sexology against Itself

Dating back to the publication of Onanism (1760), a seminal text in French sexology, the biologist Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728–1797) included letters as evidentiary findings. While Tissot included only correspondences that confirmed his diagnosis of masturbation as a life-threatening and evil vice, by the end of the nineteenth century, sexual science came to support a more inclusive epistolary record.11 Ulrichs, for instance, solicited and received feedback from the readers of his works. He often incorporated these letters into subsequent research. Eventually, the direct or indirect solicitation of letters gave way to questionnaires, like Hirschfeld’s “Psychobiological Questionnaire” of 1902.12 Xavier Mayne’s The Intersexes (1908) and Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Linsert’s The Means of Love (1929) also contained questionnaires. These questionnaires illustrate the solicitation of dialogue as an insignia of the discipline of sexual science. This dialogical engagement by sexologists should be contrasted to Foucault’s tendency to paint sexual science in the monochrome of dictatorial taxonomics.

One limitation of Foucault’s parsing of the sexual science as epistemic control derives from an inability to see the political ambiguity of the case study. In the eighteenth century, renowned medical doctors such as Friedrich Hoffman (1660–1742) and Tissot often organized their medical research around case studies. In the works of Hoffman and Tissot, these case studies tended to be evidentiary, but not critical. That is, epistles did not serve as immanent challenges to their general narrative about the evils of masturbation, but merely confirmed it. However, by the late nineteenth century, the character of the case study had changed. As an archetypal evidential form in the field of sexual science, the case study often functioned as a type of immanent resistance to moral organizing schemas imposed by conservative sexual scientists. A case in point is found in Albert Moll’s Examinations of Libido Sexualis (1896), a classic text of the European sexual science movement. In Case Study No. 22, Moll cited the thoughts of a homosexual physician, Mr. C. H., who dreamed of being changed into a woman:

With regard to the manner and way that I morally judge my sexual impulses and activities, I am obviously of the opinion that the former are not criminal, because I have not willed them, but rather possess them against my will and wishes. In general, the activity of my sexual impulses is nobody’s business unless I injuriously infringe upon the sphere of a third party.

The subject of Case Study No. 23 offered additional autobiographical data about bisexuality:

I love both sexes, and in fact it is the divine in human beings that attracts me. … In both, I love—with the same fire—the thinking, feeling, and divinely sacred part. … In my free and passionate love, I am too independent, too bold, too idealistic to be able to endorse the mere mechanical conception of procreative relationships. This would be, so to speak, a mechanical love; because it rests more on the mechanical than the ideal identification with another, more on physical lustful desires than on the objective recognition of a pure, ideal worthiness of being loved. … [P]ederasty is permitted by nature, that is, by God, and like every other feeling it is a free gift to humanity: Enjoy! … In view of this, I naturally am not inclined to allow my feelings to be influenced by the medical profession.13

Once available in print, the autobiographical perspectives offered in case studies became accessible to other European scholars. In Love’s Coming of Age (1896), the English sexual theorist Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) cited a case study of lesbian love found in Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). Carpenter borrowed this citation in order to substantiate his theory of sexual intermediaries and his political demand for the recognition of homosexuality as natural and ethical.14 What makes the reception of these case studies remarkable is the fact that neither Moll nor Krafft-Ebing’s scholarship supported the decriminalization of homosexuality; both described homosexuality and bisexuality as perverse and pathological. Yet, the case study as a scientific methodology gave voice to articulate individuals whose civic and moral conclusions were at odds with the convictions of leading sexologists. Sexual modernists, like Carpenter, were able to read these primary materials against the grain of Moll and Krafft-Ebing’s secondary interpretations.

The integration of epistolary and biographical knowledge into sexual scholarship was not unique to Moll. Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910), the greatest Italian representative of sexual science, used the epistolary form in his pedagogical novel One Day in Madeira: A Page in the Hygiene of Love (1868). This epistolary aesthetic of verisimilitude was not new to Mantegazza; his scientific works also made use of epistolary addenda. The integration of letters into his scholarship authenticated his conclusions about the intimate dilemmas of amatory life.15 For example, Mantegazza amended to his 1885 pioneering comparative ethnology of sexual relations a five-page letter that raised lucid objections to his own thesis that homosexuality was an unnatural perversion. The letter offered an uncompromising rejoinder:

A while back, I raised an objection to the phrase against nature, by remarking that no instinct, however strangely abnormal, could be said to be against nature, if it were congenital and not acquired.

Additionally, the letter proffered an evolutionary theory of carnal instincts not found in Mantegazza’s main text. In contrast to Mantegazza’s proselytizing on behalf of normative heterosexual monogamy, the author of the letter explained the naturalness of diverse carnal instincts:

May it not, then, be that, in seeking from pathology a key to this psychological enigma [i.e., homosexual desire], we are guilty of an error? May it not be that we should seek it from anthropology? … Even admitting (it is doubtful enough) that the two sexes were distinct and bore the characteristic marks from the time of the first couple known to the human race (or, for that matter, any race) there is no basis whatsoever for the assertion that sensual love between those two primitive individuals came to them from their difference in sex. Each of them unconsciously felt the need of kissing and ardently embracing the being of his own species with whom he lived; but this desire on their part was (if I may be permitted the phrase) a blank desire; that is to say, it found extrinsic expression in a desire that was simply carnal, but not sexual. … The carnal instincts of the parents, a blank one, was transformed with the sons into a carnal instinct that was indefinite or (to put it better) dependent upon individual taste. Thus, there would be three psychic qualities in the male and three psychic qualities in the female: masculine proclivities toward females; masculine proclivities toward males; and masculine proclivities towards both sexes (a blank masculine inclination); and feminine proclivities toward males; feminine proclivities toward females; and feminine proclivities toward both sexes (a blank feminine inclination). … Over against the category of blank individuals, there would have to be set a fourth (not numerous) classification of blank individuals, that is to say, individuals who go through their life without ever experiencing carnal desire. … Out of a pure love of truth, I should like to inquire what harm could come to humanity, if society’s laws were to permit each one (while remaining within the sphere of his own rights) to satisfy his sexual instincts in accordance with his own psychic needs.16

In the form of the autobiographical case study and the marginalia of epistolary addenda, then, sexual science often was structurally divided against itself. The very nature of the case study and epistolary amendments produced an intellectual contest between articulate sexual minorities and scientists whose commentaries invalidated diversity. The unique individuals, whose voices were recorded in case studies and letters, brought minority perspectives to life. These perspectives articulated forceful interpretations of the penal code, religion, and ideals of love that were at odds with the classificatory master narratives of deviance and pathology. The interviewees in Case Study No. 22 and No. 23, for example, made compelling arguments for an alternative view of minority sexualities. These arguments included (1) a legal argument about criminal behavior, (2) a theological argument transferring the logic of natural religion—all that God created is Good—to the realm of human sexuality, and (3) an ideal of love that transcended morphological and antipodal definitions of sexual identity.17 The unknown author of the letter to Mantegazza likewise presented a plausible explanation of the naturalness of nonheterosexual and nonprocreative desire.

Any critical assessment of sexual science, then,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: Post-Victorians and Sexual Science
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Motifs in Sexual Science
• 2. Inventing Sexual Liberalism
• 3. The Epistemic Politics of Nature
• 4. The Science of Agape
• 5. Sexual Degeneration and Bourgeois Culture: From Eduard Reich to Max Nordau
• 6. Normalizing the Marquis de Sade: Iwan Bloch and Historical Sexology
• Afterword: Ulrichs Street and Epistemic Politics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index